Ramesh, I will be happy to “prove” to you why an elimination of a relatively high mortgage interest deduction number is disastrous for the overall real-estate market. Here’s how it works. Anyone with a mortgage in excess of, say, $400,000 will suddenly find his own home prohibitively expensive because the family’s monthly payment will suddenly skyrocket. Said family will have to sell their home, getting rid of it quickly — and this will be the case with perhaps hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously. If mid-to-high-end houses begin to lose their value in a sale glut, this will in turn drive down prices everywhere in the market for obvious reasons. Would it balance out in ten years’ time? Yes, perhaps. But that’s a long ten years. Which is why this is a boneheaded idea, and why this reform is, in effect, a tax increase, why it will therefore never be attempted and why the tax-reform commissioners were lame-brains for even considering it. This is macro-economics at its most thoughtless — because it fails to consider the effect such a change might have at the family-by-family level.